Native American architecture

Professor Morningstar begins the third week outside. She meets the class at the edge of the river path, near a circle of boulders set in the grass, and asks them to stand facing east. 'Before Europeans came, this land had architecture,' she says. 'People built homes, cities, earthworks and ceremonial structures for thousands of years, with knowledge as precise as any engineering textbook. Most of what you learned in your history courses starts somewhere else and arrives here late. Today we start here.' She explains that she will speak about many nations, but that she speaks with authority only about her own, and that everything she says about others she has learned from their people and their writings. 'If you remember one thing,' she says, 'remember that there is no such thing as Native American architecture in the singular. There are hundreds of architectures, as different from each other as Japanese is from Norwegian.'

The United States recognizes 574 tribal nations, each with its own government, territory or homelands, language and history, and many more Native communities exist without federal recognition. Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians have their own distinct traditions. Tribal nations are sovereign governments with a government-to-government relationship with the United States, established through treaties, the Constitution and federal law. This lesson introduces the main building traditions of Native nations, the disruption of colonization and the remarkable growth of contemporary Native architecture, and it asks how non-Native architects can work respectfully in this field.

Shared principles, many forms

Writers on Indigenous design often name principles that appear across many nations, while warning against turning them into a formula. The first is relationship: buildings exist within relationships with land, water, sky, animals, plants, ancestors and future generations, and design begins with those relationships rather than with an object. The second is the circle, which in many cultures expresses equality, the cycles of seasons and life, and the gathering of a community facing one another. The third is orientation to the land and the sky, especially to the cardinal directions and to the rising sun in the east. The fourth is gathering: many traditions give priority to spaces where the whole community, including Elders and children, can come together. The fifth is the use of local, natural materials, gathered with respect and returned to the land when a building's life ends.

These principles are real and widely shared, but every nation interprets them differently, and some do not apply at all to some nations. A circle may be central to one nation's ceremonies and of little meaning to another's. Designers who apply a generic set of Indigenous principles, a circular plan, a feather motif, a fire pit and a sweetgrass garden, without learning the specific nation's knowledge, produce what some critics call pan-Indigenous architecture: buildings that look Indigenous in a general way but belong to no one in particular.

The six forms in the figure show how different traditions solved different problems. The wiigiwaam, a dome of bent saplings covered with birchbark or cattail mats, could be built quickly by a family and adapted for seasons by adding or removing layers. The lodge of the Plains nations, a cone of long poles covered with buffalo hide and later canvas, could be taken down and moved in an hour, suited to following the buffalo, and its adjustable smoke flaps controlled draft and ventilation. The earth lodge of the Mandan and Hidatsa on the upper Missouri River, a large round frame on four central posts covered with willow, grass and earth, housed extended families in permanent villages and held a steady temperature through winter and summer. The plank houses of the Northwest Coast, built of massive cedar posts, beams and split planks, housed several families of a lineage and displayed their crests on carved posts and painted fronts. The Inuit snow house, a dome of snow blocks laid in a rising spiral so that it stands without formwork, used snow's insulating air to stay far warmer inside than out. The Diné hogan, an eight-sided or round house of logs and earth, faces its door to the east to greet the rising sun.

Traditions across the United States

In the eastern woodlands, the Haudenosaunee of what is now New York built longhouses, long barrel-roofed structures of bark over a frame of poles, sometimes more than 150 feet long, which housed several families of a clan along a central row of fires; the Confederacy calls itself the People of the Longhouse. Around the Great Lakes and in Minnesota, the Ojibwe built wiigiwaams of birchbark, and the Dakota, whose homelands include much of Minnesota, lived in bark houses in summer villages and hide lodges when hunting. On the Plains, the Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow and many other nations lived in hide lodges moved with the seasons. On the upper Missouri, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara built earth lodge villages. In the Southwest, the Diné built hogans, and the Pueblo peoples built multi-story towns of adobe and stone; Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, inhabited for about a thousand years, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as are the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in Colorado.

Native North America also built on a monumental scale. At Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, a Mississippian city of perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 people flourished around 1050 to 1350, with plazas and more than a hundred earthen mounds, including Monks Mound, the largest earthwork in North America. The Hopewell earthworks of Ohio, built about 2,000 years ago with geometric precision and aligned to the cycles of the moon, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023. On the Northwest Coast, nations such as the Coast Salish, Makah and Tlingit built large cedar plank houses, and in Alaska, Iñupiat and Yup'ik peoples built semi-underground sod houses that held heat through the Arctic winter.

Disruption and survival

Colonization disrupted every one of these traditions, through the means that Lesson 4 examines in detail: removal and reservations, the Dawes Act of 1887, which broke up tribal land into individual allotments, the boarding schools, the banning of ceremonies and, later, federal housing programs that imposed small, single-family houses designed for other climates and nuclear families. Under the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, the federal government encouraged Native people to move to cities, including Minneapolis, which became home to one of the largest urban Native communities in the country. In many communities, the knowledge of traditional building was suppressed or lost within one or two generations. Yet it survived, in families, in ceremonies held in secret, in language and in the land itself, and since the 1970s it has been reclaimed and renewed.

Contemporary Native architecture

The National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington (2004) was a landmark. Its original design was by Douglas Cardinal, a Niitsitapi and Métis architect from Canada, and it was completed by a team including Johnpaul Jones, of Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, with the participation of many Native consultants. Its curving limestone walls evoke land shaped by wind and water, its entrance faces east and its grounds include wetlands, croplands and forest. Johnpaul Jones received the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2014. A younger generation of Native architects, many organized through the American Indian Council of Architects and Engineers, now leads projects for tribal governments, schools, clinics and housing across the country.

In Minneapolis, the Minneapolis American Indian Center on East Franklin Avenue, which first opened in 1975, has long been the heart of the urban Native community. A renovation and expansion costing 32.5 million dollars, led by the architect Sam Olbekson, the center's board chair, with partners, added about 20,000 square feet, for a total of over 66,000. Its new drum-shaped rotunda is the central gathering space, visible from Franklin Avenue, with a café, gym, gallery, meeting rooms, a teen technology room and a dining area for elders overlooking the gym. Along the same avenue, Native organizations have created what they call the American Indian Cultural Corridor, with galleries such as All My Relations Arts and Native-led housing and businesses.

Many Native architects today describe their work as a form of sovereignty: tribal nations deciding what their own buildings should be, rather than accepting what federal agencies or outside firms provide. Tribal governments now commission schools, health clinics, government buildings, housing and cultural buildings designed with their own communities, and some have their own planning and design departments. Several tribal colleges teach construction and design, preparing students to build in their own nations. These projects range from modest, practical buildings to ambitious cultural landmarks, but they share a principle: the nation decides.

Working respectfully as a non-Indigenous architect

Many architects who are not Indigenous will work on projects for Indigenous clients or on Indigenous land, and the profession has developed guidance. Several points recur. Begin with relationships, not projects: get to know the community, on its terms and time. Recognize that the community, through its government, Elders and Knowledge Keepers, owns its cultural knowledge, and that stories, symbols and ceremonies shared with you are not yours to publish or reuse. Ask how decisions are made in the community and respect that process, which may differ from a client's board meeting. Hire Indigenous designers, consultants and builders. Be honest about what you do not know. And remember that many Indigenous communities need, first of all, good, affordable, durable buildings that work in their climate, not symbolic ones.

Sacred and ceremonial structures deserve special care. The sweat lodge, the Sun Dance lodge, the shaking tent and many others are not design references. Their forms, meanings and protocols belong to the nations and the people authorized to conduct ceremonies. If a community wants a ceremonial space in a building, its own Knowledge Keepers decide what it is and how it is made.

Exercise 3: whose land, which nations

This exercise takes about three hours.

• Find out whose traditional territory the school stands on, which treaties or agreements apply, and which nations live in your city today.
• Use sources produced by those nations themselves, such as their own websites, publications and cultural organizations, where available.
• Identify one building or landscape in the region designed by or with Indigenous people and visit it if you can.
• Deliverable: a two-page summary with sources, and a 400-word reflection on what you did not know before.

Self-critique checklist

• Have I named specific nations rather than generalizing?
• Have I relied on sources created by the nations themselves?
• Have I avoided describing ceremonies or sacred knowledge that was not shared publicly?
• Have I treated Indigenous architecture as living and contemporary, not only historical?